Luca Pacioli

Luca Pacioli

A Franciscan friar who is widely regarded as the father of modern accounting. While he did not invent double-entry bookkeeping, he was the first to write a treatise on it. He was also the first to describe balance sheets and income statements. He famously said, "A person should not go to sleep at night until the debits equal the credits." He died in 1517.

29) On 8 February 1498, Fra Luca Pacioli, the Franciscan mathematician and theorist who was Leonardo's intimate friend, dedicated his De Divina Proportione treatise to Ludovico Sforza 'll Moro', greatly praising Leonardo, and suggesting that the Last Supper was finished, and that his model of the 'Sforza Horse' measured 12 braccia ('the said height from the nape to the flat ground'), and that it was of a bronze mass of 200,000 libbre.

In the furious pace of Julius's activities, it is easy to forget that this pope's headlong involvement in the vita activa was ruled by an extraordinary intellect: he had supervised the Vatican Library from its foundation by his uncle Pope Sixtus IV, counted the mathematician Luca Pacioli among his friends, and commissioned works of art whose density of meaning far outstrips those sponsored by his bookish successor Leo X.

Until now, most CPAs used computers simply to automate the tasks they have been doing since the double-entry bookkeeping method long used by Venetian merchants was codified and published by Fra Luca Pacioli 500 years ago.

Bud Kulesza is a man who is equally at ease discussing the roots of the profession - sprinkling his conversations with references to Luca Pacioli - as he is with computer technology and the latest international accounting and industry issues.

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